» The demand for more organized, collaborative and efficient approaches to health informatics standards development that deliver a more coherent, comprehensive, and coordinated set of readily implementable health informatics standards;

» The importance of consistency across health informatics standards and the need for collaboration in their development to ensure semantic interoperability across health processes and between health information systems;

» That health informatics standardization is supported by a community of experts that works within and across various health informatics standards development organizations (SDOs).

The mission of the JIC is to work effectively in accordance with its Charter to:

» promote interoperability and seek to avoid overlaps and inconsistencies between standards used in health informatics;

» respecting the expertise, mandates, structures, operations, interests and boundaries of its members and other health informatics standards developers.

The members of the JIC are encouraged to:

» seek opportunities to work closely with other members and entities to promote harmonization of health informatics standards and to avoid overlapping, counter-productive and counteracting standards;

» establish and maintain active formal liaisons and collaborative arrangements with members and other entities that develop or support the use of standards in various health domains and across different technology platforms;

» maintain processes for critical review and evaluation of standards proposals to ensure that they are relevant to business requirements and are likely to produce results that are aligned with other standards and benefit the global consumers of health informatics standards; and

» share experiences and capabilities with other members of the JIC to advance collaboration and the state-of-the-art in global health informatics standardization.

The JIC is not a legal entity, does not have its own resources (other than those made available by its members) and does not have the power to develop or publish standards in its own right.

Current members of the JIC (in alphabetical order) are CDISC, CEN/TC 251, DICOM, GS1, HL7 International, IHE International, ISO/TC251, Personal Connected Health Alliance, and SNOMED International. Other SDOs may be invited to participate as appropriate to the work and domain of the JIC and that meet specific criteria as identified in the Charter of the JIC.